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The Development of an Animal Welfare Impact Assessment (AWIA) Tool and Its Application to Bovine Tuberculosis and Badger Control in England

McCulloch, SP; Reiss, MJ; (2017) The Development of an Animal Welfare Impact Assessment (AWIA) Tool and Its Application to Bovine Tuberculosis and Badger Control in England. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 10.1007/s10806-017-9684-5. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Bovine tuberculosis (bovine TB) is a controversial animal health policy issue in England, which impacts farmers, the public, cattle and badgers. Badgers (Meles meles) act as a wildlife reservoir of disease. Policy options for badger control include (1) do nothing, (2) badger culling, and (3) badger vaccination. This paper argues for mandatory Animal Welfare Impact Assessment (AWIA) for all policy that significantly affects sentient animals. AWIA includes (1) species description, and (2) AWIA analysis stages. In this paper, AWIA is applied to impacts of bovine TB policy options on cattle and badgers. Over 4 years, 85,000 badgers will be culled to prevent the slaughter of ~17,750 cattle over 9 years. Hence, about five badgers are culled for every cow which avoids slaughter. The AWIA analyses the impact of badger vaccination on cows and badgers based on a set of stated assumptions. The AWIA estimates badger vaccination to reduce the number of cows slaughtered by 11,600, i.e. a 12.5% reduction. Additional to the harm of killing, culling has greater welfare impacts on badgers compared to non-culling options. Actors in animal health and welfare policy were interviewed about the concept of AWIA. Policy actors supported the idea of AWIA to provide objective data to feed into policy making. The paper concludes with the proposal that AWIA is a necessary stage of just policy making where sentient animals are impacted by government policy.

Type: Article
Title: The Development of an Animal Welfare Impact Assessment (AWIA) Tool and Its Application to Bovine Tuberculosis and Badger Control in England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s10806-017-9684-5
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9684-5
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords: Animal Welfare Impact Assessment (AWIA); Badger culling; Badger vaccination; Bovine tuberculosis; Domestic cow (Bos taurus); European badger (Meles meles)
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1571907
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